You may be surprised to know that some households have multiple Nobel Prizes on their mantelpieces. Meet some of the families whose groundbreaking work has been recognised by the Nobel Prize.

There are numerous relatives and couples across almost every Nobel Prize category, however there is one particular family that stands out. Meet the Curies, who have an impressive five Nobel Prizes between them.

Marie Curie and Pierre Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics as husband and wife for their research on the radiation phenomena. Sadly, Pierre died in 1906, but Marie was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, and the isolation of radium. She opened up a completely new field of research: radioactivity, and revolutionised medicine.

Family life and research 

Being a scientist and a parent, Marie faced the same challenge of many researchers today.

“It became a serious problem how to take care of our little Irène and of our home without giving up my scientific work,” she said.

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1 (of 2) Marie Curie and her daughters Irène and Eve sitting on a bench in the garden (1905).

Copyright © Association Curie Joliot-Curie Photographer unknown

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2 (of 2) Irène Curie and her mother Marie Curie in the laboratory at the Radium Institute in Paris, France, 1921.

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Thankfully, she managed to balance her work with her family life, with the “close union” of her family enabling her to carry on with her research.

Marie had strong ideas about the upbringing and education of her children. She organised a school which revolved around the idea that children should be allowed to develop freely, experiment and learn scientific subjects from an early age from top professors and family friends. This educational experiment probably laid the foundations for her oldest daughter Irène’s career in research.

In 1935, Irène Joliot-Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband Frédéric Joliot. Together, they discovered the first-ever artificially created radioactive atoms, paving the way for innumerable medical advances, especially in the fight against cancer.

Couples with Nobel Prizes

Irène and Frédéric are far from being the only couple to become Nobel Prize laureates.

At medical school Gerty Cori was introduced to biochemistry and fellow student Carl Cori – both were to play a major role in her life. Gerty and Carl married in 1920 and the two worked together to uncover the process of cellular energy storage and release, answering one of the most fundamental questions about how the human body works. 

Despite Gerty not receiving equal status or pay to her husband, she transformed the study of biology with him, proving that the clarity of molecular chemistry could and should be applied to the opaque mechanisms of biology. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1947, with Gerty becoming the first female medicine laureate.

Almost seven decades later, in 2014, May-Britt Moser and Edward Moser were jointly awarded the medicine prize for their discoveries of cells that constitute the brain’s ‘GPS system.’ The duo “burned with eagerness to understand the brain,” at the University of Oslo where they met. Their shared intellectual passion blossomed into a romantic and professional partnership. While earning their PhDs, the Mosers had two children. Together, they learned how the brain perceives where the body is positioned and discovered the cellular basis of cognitive function and became Nobel Prize laureates. Despite divorcing after receiving a Nobel Prize, they continue to collaborate to uncover the workings of the brain.

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee were added to the list of prize-awarded couples when they were awarded the prize in economic sciences in 2019, alongside their collaborator Michael Kremer. “When I first met Abhijit Banerjee as a first-year student, I found him unbelievably inspiring. He was kind and a bit aloof, but I knew crossing his path had changed my life,” Duflo said. “Little did I know that many, many years later, I would not only become a colleague, but also, eventually, a life partner.” 

Together, they pursued an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty, founding the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. 

Not all couples have shared prizes, or been awarded them in the same category. In 1974, Gunnar Myrdal became an economic sciences laureate for his work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations. Eight years later, his wife Alva Myrdal – a successful diplomat – shared the Nobel Peace Prize 1982 for her work for disarmament and nuclear and weapon-free zones. “War is murder. […] In a nuclear age the victims would be numbered by the millions,” she said in her Nobel Prize lecture.

‘Nobel Prize children’ – and siblings

For some families, one could wonder if there is a certain Nobel Prize gene. There are several examples of Nobel Prize-awarded family members; parents and children as well as siblings.

Being a Nobel Prize laureate and a daughter of one – like Marie Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie – is rare. On the contrary, Nobel Prize-awarded fathers and sons are far more common. Renowned physicist Niels Bohr and his son, Aage Bohr, are perhaps the best-known.

Niels proposed a theory for the structure of atoms, advancing theoretical physics, which was recognised with the Nobel Prize in Physics 1922. As WW2 raged on, Niels and his son Aage travelled in an empty bomb rack of a British military plane to the United States where they joined work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Decades after the historical project, Aage received his own Nobel Prize for discovering the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection.

At the age of 25, Lawrence Bragg became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. The achievement was made even more special because he shared the 1915 physics prize with his father, Sir William Bragg, for analysing crystal structure using X-rays. Their findings created the new science of X-ray crystallography, making it possible to determine molecular structures from the crystal form of a compound.

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Another father and son duo to become Nobel Prize laureates was Sune K. Bergström and Svante Pääbo. Bergström was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 for producing pure prostaglandins – hormone-like substances used as medicines. 40 years later, his son received the prize for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.

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Although father and son, Svante said in an interview it was his mother, rather than father who had the bigger influence on his choice of career.

“(…) She sort of was very much into science, and very much stimulated and encouraged me through the years,” said Svante.

To date there is only one set of siblings that have both been awarded the prize. In 1969, Jan Tinbergen, aged 66, received the first prize in economic sciences. Four years later, his younger brother, Nikolaas Tinbergen, was awarded a Nobel Prize, but in physiology or medicine. Nikolaas was also 66 years old.

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Jan was the quiet mathematician and Nikolaas the outgoing adventurer. Jan introduced econometrics, a synthesis between mathematics, economic theory and statistics. Nikolaas received his Nobel Prize for his work in reviving and developing the biological science of animal behaviour: ethology. His first work showed the importance of visual cues that enable female wasps, despite the many different nests they build, to return to the correct one.

Whether brothers, husband and wife, or mother and daughter, each of these family members has made their own contribution to peace, science or literature. Who do you think will join the ‘Nobel Prize family’ next? And, more importantly, how will they have changed our world for the better?

Published March 2025